MLK-FBI (2020)

This is the year, when George Floyd was killed in front of three other police officers who did nothing to stop him and an onlooker who filmed the whole thing so that the rest of us, particularly white America could see irrefutable evidence that the police brutalize black Americans and sometimes do not stop at humiliating them, but go all the way to killing them in cold blood on the street. This year we are also reckoning with other abuses of law enforcement from the past. Hoover sees MLK as a threat, and he also probably sees the civil rights movement as a threat. He attacks King on two fronts. One is his association with Stanley Levison, a white Jewish lawyer and CPA who had a history of association with Communist groups. The FBI, still embroiled in the war against Communism, saw the presence of Levison as a red flag, a sign that the Communist menace was embedded in the struggle for Civil Rights. We see a fascinating clip of King, in a television interview with Dan Rather, saying that he thinks it’s one of the miracles of the 20th century that so few African-Americans have turned to Communism, given their history of desperation and oppression. Nonetheless, King is warned off Levison at the highest level of government. Then there is the wiretapping and the bugging of King's hotel rooms. Through this activity the FBI learns that King is not monogamous, and they seek to humiliate him using this information. They alert church leaders and other influential people, including his wife, in the hopes that he would retreat. Through it all, King marches on, and is living with the daily anxiety that he’ll be exposed. Yet in no way does it tamp down on his activism. The film captures how radical the stand King took in 1967 against the war in Vietnam really was. He was willing to make enemies and to risk his personal reputation for his beliefs. In the end, it is hard not to see a role for the FBI in the end game. The FBI killed Fred Hubbard, the head of the Black Panthers, and they may also have led to the assasination of MLK.